Main menu

Monthly Archives: December 2012

A Creative Process Outsourcing House is not another competitor for advertising agencies, instead it is a partner that provides creative and digital support to help the agencies increase efficiency and grow their capabilities.

In the current economic scenario,running business is getting tougher by the day. To stay competitive in the market, agencies need to look for ways to streamline their business processes in order to increase their productivity and reduce their costs. One of the biggest challenges today is the pressure of crunching client budget that result in shrinking profit margins of the agencies themselves.

A simple solution for this problem is to outsource your everyday, process oriented or time consuming jobs like adaptations, web maintenance, social media maintenance, editing, etc. at a reasonable cost and use your in-house creative teams for cognitive jobs and developing your core competencies, such are campaign conceptualization, new pitches, etc.

You can outsource your work to a freelancer, who often has a limited range of expertise and services. Alternatively, you can partner with a CPO, that offers you a team of experts who can provide all the services you may need from time to time, under one roof. In the long run, a CPO can also help you expand your plethora of services. Let us see how.

The Creative team is the soul of any advertising agency, and you have surely handpicked each one of your creatives, to ensure the best of talent is a part of your team. But what if most of your team’s time and efforts are wasted in non-cognitive, routine jobs or operational adaptations? It would not only frustrate the creatives, but also shoot up your operational costs.

This is where a CPO steps in. It helps you focus on your strengths and deliver high quality creative work at reasonable costs by executing all operational aspects of your campaigns and communication material. It is a win-win solution for the agency, as they save their time, effort and resources and are able to deliver quality work on time to their clients.

Statistically speaking, outsourcing your routine jobs and sudden workloads to a CPO can improve your bottom line revenues by 40%. Along with the cost advantage, a Creative Outsourcing House also assures for you, the best of quality and ease of communication through dedicated account managers, phone lines and ids for each account.

Here are a few process-oriented jobs that can easily be outsourced to a CPO:

– Ad / campaign adaptations

– Social Media Maintenance

– Website development, maintenance

– Search Engine Optimization

– Content Writing

– Editing, Proofreading

– Photo-editing

– E-mailers & E-newsletters

– Web Banners

– Newsletters

– Direct Mailers

– Brochures

– Event collaterals

These are just some of the jobs that can be outsourced to a CPO. While you develop the core concepts, a CPO can execute them on various platforms and media for you. Or, in case you are overburdened with a sudden overload of work from the client, you can pass on the non-exciting work to the CPO, so that your best resources work on the jobs that’ll get your agency the praise and recognition it deserves!

In simple words, what a CPO House does is, it adds to agencies’ capabilities, without a large investment, helping you grow from small to big and from big to bigger.

This is how it works?

Creative Process Outsourcing partnerships can be taken as a strategic move by the agencies in order to gain a competitive edge in the market. It thus, opens up opportunities for organizations/agencies to utilize skill sets and expertise that they normally would not be able to access without a large investment. It can also become a savior to startups and small agencies, which have a modest capital to work with.

In times when creative teams are overburdened with routine jobs that take up much of their time and there is a constant rise in the cost of resources, the marginal profits of the agencies are going down. This is where a CPO can help you out, by helping your provide better services to your clientele, at a lower cost.

Here area few advantages that you enjoy with a CPO partnership:

1. Enhanced service portfolio:

There are many agencies that provide only specific creative services to their clients, but there are clients’ who want all their creative work to be done from a single point of contact. In such a situation, agencies either have to say NO to the client or have to contact different agencies for each service. This is where a CPO steps in. It can provide a single touch-point for various services required, working for the client on behalf of and under the name of the agency.

2. Better focus on core competency:

As the agency grows or the number of clients grows, routine jobs for the creative teams also multiply. These jobs take up much of the time and energy of the creative teams. Outsourcing these jobs frees the creatives from non-core functions and puts their focus back on their core competencies. This also gives the agencies more time and opportunity to expand their business, while reducing the cost of human resources and infrastructure.

3. Complete flexibility of resources:

A CPO house provides you complete flexibility in choosing the resources as per your requirement. These are trained in your regional and cultural sensitivities and do not take much time in understanding your brand and agency procedures.

Besides, each resource comes with a probation period, where you can observe the resource’s performance and in case you are not satisfied, you get an option of replacement at no extra recruitment cost. Additionally, you have the flexibility to lay off a resource by giving a notice of just 15 days, without paying for any liability or dues.

4. Reduced operating & resource costs:

Lower cost is perhaps the biggest advantage of creative outsourcing. Work is done at a fraction of the cost as compared to the cost incurred when it is done locally without compromising on quality. Besides the resource cost, you also save on your operational costs with limited resources stationed at your entity.

5. Entry into the untapped SME market:

Today,the SME market is not just massive and growing but also mostly untapped. This is mainly because the agencies find it difficult to bear the high costs of the resources in the region for exploring this low-cost segment. With a CPO partnership, an agency can easily enter the growing SME market, without having to bear the cost differentials.

Listed above are just some of the advantages that one can enjoy by outsourcing work to a CPO. Be it a small sized agency looking for growth, a mid-sized agency looking to diversify or even a large-sized agency planning to expand in various sectors and regions, a CPO can always come handy for providing better, more diversified and cost-effective services to the relevant market.